As we all know, Russia blew up the dam.
Nearly all the environmental agencies and protestors are … silent.
Shows their true colours, I think.
Peter, I think the UN has already said something that this is an enormous ecological disaster.
Peter wrote:
Nearly all the environmental agencies and protestors are … silent. Shows their true colours, I think.
Come on! The media are full of reports about the ecological disaster brought on by the collapsed dam.
It’s like you want to nag on environmentalists.
The media, of course, but the various “rights” campaigners are eerily quiet.
Most support Russia (against the nasty evil imperialist West – the default fashionable position ever since Vietnam) but are just smart enough to realise that supporting Russia is not going to win a whole load of support within the general population. Especially seeing the increasing backlash on certain other popular topics on which roughly 0.1% of the population have aggressively hijacked the agenda… So they say nothing.
Or one gets cries of “stop the war” from the academic establishment who are against supporting Ukraine i.e. let Russia win and trash the place, but that’s OK because the salaries of these people will always be paid straight to their bank. The UCU twats have just dug themselves a big hole That URL is straight from the very organisation 
What that article doesn’t say is that they campaign for no military aid to Ukraine which is obviously exactly equivalent to giving it all to Putin.
Airborne_Again wrote:
The media are full of reports about the ecological disaster brought on by the collapsed dam.
the media yes.
Where are the “last generation” sticky finger gluers? Where is “Greenpeace” and all of those?
Darn silent.
If this is an attack and not “just” a dam which breaks because it has been neglected over decades and has incidently burst at it’s highest water level for years, then this means Russia has resorted to potential mass destruction. And it really looks that way, as the flood is very nicely shielding the conquered areas from counterattack by Ukraine. This however means, the war has just escalated to a different level.
The term is “useful idiots”, I believe (wasn’t it a Soviet leader who coined this term for his western supporters?)
Where are the “last generation” sticky finger gluers? Where is “Greenpeace” and all of those?
Darn silent.
Exactly.
because it has been neglected over decades and has incidently burst at it’s highest water level for years
I read this morning the explosion was captured on a russian security camera and they forgot to block it. However, I haven’t seen the footage yet.
It would have taken literally tons of explosive.
IMHO (we are all experts, hey?) this won’t affect UKR’s counteroffensive because they would not have done it that far west. Not initially, anyway. And they would have had a plan because they plan pretty well everything, and the bridge was a known weak point, which the russkies had openly attached explosives to ages ago. The best place to do it is further east because you get the best compromise between cutting off Russians in the south, and all of Crimea (assuming they blow the Kerch bridge again, which now they can, anytime) and having to hold a supported front from the east. That way the eastern front will be as short as possible.
Russians also lost a load of hardware with this.
There won’t be an escalation. Just more work for the UKR army which now has a job rescuing a load of people. Russia has just shown itself to be a total bunch of bastards which is very far away from ever being accepted back into the civilised world even upon regime change. To hell with avoiding the humiliation of Versailles (Russia already has its “Hitler”, and every leader since Lenin was a “Hitler”); isolation will be the name of the game.
The term is “useful idiots”, I believe (wasn’t it a Soviet leader who coined this term for his western supporters?)
Yes – Lenin.
Peter wrote:
It would have taken literally tons of explosive.
Exactly. Hence there are people around who are asking questions. It is not that easy to blow up a dam like this, but if it is previously damaged or neglected, it’s a different thing. This dam has been without it’s usual upkeep since the war started, which is quite some time now. Seeing how dams are regulated even without them being in a war zone and without any maintenance over a year, heaven alone knows what happens if such an installation gets a high water mark.
It’s going to be difficult to determine what exactly happened but dam failures for whatever reason can be quite devastating.
Peter wrote:
The term is “useful idiots”, I believe (wasn’t it a Soviet leader who coined this term for his western supporters?)Yes – Lenin.
Apparently not: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Useful_idiot
Peter wrote:
It would have taken literally tons of explosive.
One geotechnical engineer familiar with the design of this dam has already estimated it at 8-10 tons of high explosive if it were attached at certain critical points situated underwater. Detonating a fixed charge on top of the dam would require at least an order of magnitude more, and bombing/shelling would require a nuclear warhead.
